Making Big AdWords Changes in the Web Interface (Yes, It’s Possible)

Whether you manage small PPC accounts or large PPC accounts, there are many times when you need to make a lot of changes quickly. In the early days, this meant downloading a spreadsheet into Excel, manipulating the data with your changes, and then re-uploading. The release of the AdWords Editor gave us the power to make lots of changes quickly even when offline. If you haven’t already, I recommend you download it immediately. But what if you need to make a lot of changes and you don’t have the Editor?

The good news is that AdWords has made significant strides in their web interface to make lots of changes quickly. I’ll cover the 3 most powerful tools:

Bulk Edit

Very appropriately named, this is where you select multiple rows in the interface and change them at the same time. Here is an example where I wanted to set several campaign end dates at the same time. First you need to select the rows you want and click the “Edit” dropdown. At that point several fields become editable.
The yellow rows are the rows I selected and once I’ve put the change into one row I can easily click the box and it will populate that into all the other rows. Super cool!

Filters

What if you need to change several keywords or ads that are in different campaigns and/or ad groups? How do you get them on the same screen so that you can use the bulk edit function mentioned above? Filters.

In a nutshell, you create a filter so that the displayed information fits a set of criteria. I’d write an awesome tutorial, but it’s already been done. Read this tutorial on how to create filters in AdWords. I’ll wait for you to finish.

Copy/Paste

If you’ve logged into AdWords recently you’ve probably seen a message like this one:
This is the same copy/paste functionality that you’ve used in the AdWords Editor, but in the interface. Want to move ad groups into another campaign? Want to copy your new awesome ad copy from the test ad groups into all the ad groups? Now you just copy/paste. Nice!